They That Walk In The Shadows
by stardust-bones
Summary: When he's caught in the blood freezing clench of his nightmares, he falls to the ground and buries his face in the crook of his arms. And in his nightmares, he tries to keep dreaming. Ten-centric. One-shot.


**AN: I'm bored and drabbling. I don't feel like studying. It's a humid, rainy day here, and I'd much rather spend my time writing than solving Trig problems. Written on a whim, because I rather enjoy writing like that. Also, I freaking love Tennant!  
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**Disclaimer: I own nada. That's why I'm writing fanfiction and not original fiction.**

His nightmares are empty, desperate things.

When he sleeps, his mind swirls black like tornadoes and hailstorms and shadows. Every moment behind closed eyelids is a whirlwind of thoughts chasing themselves in frenzied, lopsided circles. In his nightmares, he is always alone, deeply and frantically and breathlessly alone. There is no one here to hold his hand, no warm voices and bright faces to bring him out of the dark. There is only himself and his solitude.

In his nightmares, his company is silence, and it watches him, smothers him. He feels it in the air, that heavy aura of quiet so thick and alive with energy it breathes, prowling in the emptiness like a giant monster. Sometimes he imagines the silence has invisible eyes and pointed teeth, and maybe he's standing in its great gaping mouth. And one day the monstrous silence is going to swallow him whole.

He's supposed to be a rationalist, a scientist, a thinker. But there is no rationality here.

He stands in the silence and the dark, never knowing what is to come, only knowing that this a void like no other. That this is what he truly fears− that one day all the world will leave him behind. His eternity will be spent blind and pained and waiting for light that will never come. Waiting for quiet that will never be broken. Waiting for faces lost to unstoppable levers and impossible white walls to come back and tell him what he always wanted to hear.

When he's caught in the blood−freezing clench of his nightmares, he falls to the ground and buries his face in the crook of his arms. And in his nightmares, he tries to keep dreaming.

Sometimes, lying there in the hum of dead languages and lullabies long forgotten, the details come back to him. Silver leaves, burnished in the sunlight like starlight incarnate, glowing with a saturation that puts fires to shame. They cling to the slender tree branches fragile as spider webs, flickering in the breeze like mirages made solid. He would stare at them for hours as though waiting for them to open up and whisper all the secrets of the world.

Through the gaps in the branches, the sky burns with a glorious hue. He leans towards the crimson sunlight, and the glow fills him to the core. He can sense it all around him− the warmth of light on his face, the smell of the grass underneath his feet, the roar of the endless mountains calling to him from the horizon line.

Gallifrey.

But once the name comes back to him, it all shatters into shards of blood−tinted glass. Because once he lets the name settle on his tongue, the rest of reality comes with it. The pain and the nightmare, and all the world gone in the single press of a button. He wakes to the finite clutches of reality with sweat dancing in the creases of furrowed brows, salt gathering at the edges of chapped lips, and beads of blood forming on broken skin where his fingers have scrunched too tight.

He sits up in a tangle of sheet and a labyrinth of quiet. He snaps a finger, and the TARDIS lights take a flickering breath and rise, too, from the holds of sleep. He draws his knees up to his chest and tries to breathe, but his heart is shivering and his lungs are weak with an emotion that he can't quite explain.

His walls are painted red, red as grass and leaf and mountaintop, red as sun and star and sky. Red as Gallifrey, every inch. It's not quite home, but for a minute it helps. The walls surround him with the ghost of an embrace, while high above his ceiling watches over him in its own personal midnight. A pitch black sky, with one large, glorious Earth smack dab in the middle− the anchor that he always finds tucked in the center of his soul. If he has a soul at all, but who knows what death and regeneration has taken away from him?

As he eyes the painted planet and all its swirling kingdoms of sea and land, he finds a little more air trickling back into his lungs. In hindsight, he's glad he had the TARDIS paint the sphere with a particularly large amount of Europe. He could have asked for the image of Earth to rotate on its axis like the real thing, but he'd rather it remain stationary. He even added a marker right over London, a flower, bright red and blooming.

He smiles to himself and lies down on his back, gaze wandering around the ceiling. His eyes spend more time moving than observing, but somehow they always find themselves lingering right on the giant flower where London should be.

There was a nightmare somewhere, and a dream there too, behind his eyelids, but the images are shattered and foggy. He longs to remember, but some part of him says that perhaps it's better if he just keeps living.

So he lies in the light, and finally he breathes.


End file.
